E-books offer parents another solution for lost books

It happens a few times a year around our house.  A child has an English class assignment due the next day, but has either lost the relevant book or forgotten it at school.  (I'm talking about novels and other guided reading, not textbooks.)  Our options used to be to hope the local library was open and had an available copy of the book or to check the local bookstore*.  Now with ebooks we have another option to download the book instantly.  We have a Kindle and an iPod Touch, but of course an iPad, Nook or other e-readers would serve as well.

Within a few years, it's possible most reading will probably be done on on e-readers.  What will we do when our child loses his Kindle?

* Not such a good solution since our local bookstore shut down last month.

Wikipedia co-founder argues for the importance of 'memorizing facts'

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, explains in an EDUCAUSE essay why he disagrees with the notion that "the instant availability of information online makes the memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary".  He appears to be channeling Daniel Willingham in promoting the idea that a rich base of knowledge is the foundation for critical thinking and creative problem solving.

Sanger's essay also includes his thoughts on group learning and constructing knowledge (fodder for future posts), but in this post my focus is his view on the topic of memorizing facts.   I should note it's been my observation that when "educationists" and others object to "rote" learning, much of the time they are really arguing against the need to practice.  They seem to be in denial of the unfortunate reality that practice is often a "dull" but unavoidable exercise in the acquisition of knowledge.

Whenever I encounter yet another instance of educationists' arguments against "memorizing," the following rather abstract yet simple thought springs to my philosopher's mind: Surely the only way to know something is to have memorized it. How can I be said to know something that I do not remember? So being opposed to memorizing has always sounded to me like being opposed to knowledge. I realize this argument likely seems glib. The thing educationists object to, of course, is not the remembering or even the memorizing but rather the memorizing by rote — that is, by dull repetition and often without experience or understanding.

In a December 2008 interview, Don Tapscott, a popular writer on the subject of the Internet and society, argued that the Internet is now "the fountain of knowledge" and that students need not memorize particular facts such as historical dates. …This view is common enough among the Wikipedia users I have come across; they sometimes declare that since the free online encyclopedia is so huge and easy to use, they feel less pressure to commit "trivia" to memory....

But to claim that the Internet allows us to learn less, or that it makes memorizing less important, is to belie any profound grasp of the nature of knowledge. Finding out a fact about a topic with a search in Wolfram Alpha, for example, is very different indeed from knowing about and understanding the topic. Having a well-understood fact ready to recall is far different from merely getting an unfamiliar answer to a question. Reading a few sentences in Wikipedia about some theories on the causes of the Great Depression does not mean that one thereby knows or understands this topic. Being able to read (or view) anything quickly on a topic can provide one with information, but actually having a knowledge of or understanding about the topic will always require critical study. The Internet will never change that.

Moreover, if you read an answer to a question, you usually need fairly substantial background knowledge to interpret the answer.… 

Since an ever-expanding amount of information and research is frequently updating our understanding of disciplines, there is no reason to insist on memorizing facts and figures — and no reason to insist on a core of basic knowledge and books that should be mastered.

But this argument seems fallacious. It implies that the new information has either replaced or made trivial the old information. And this is obviously not so in most subjects.… And to return to my point, unless one learns the basics in those fields, Googling a question will merely allow one to parrot an answer — not to understand it.

It also won't do to make the facile reply that there is no such thing as "the basics."... But in most fields, there is certainly a body of core knowledge.

To possess a substantial understanding of a field requires not just memorizing the facts and figures that are used by everyone in the field but also practicing, using, and internalizing those basics. To return to my "glib" argument, surely the only way to begin to know something is to have memorized it.

Robots will take over writing?

Although I am reluctant to admit it, this seems like a no-brainer.  From NPR comes news that a software program generated a better story than the one produced by a human reporter, who wrote a sports article in which he failed to highlight how the featured college baseball match was the first perfect NCAA game since 2002.  When the robot had a chance to do a rewrite and appropriately emphasized the story's noteworthy aspect, it was deemed to be a superior article.

Narrative Science provided the robot article.

We Turn Data Into Stories

Narrative Science transforms data into high-quality editorial content. Our technology application generates news stories, industry reports, headlines and more — at scale and without human authoring or editing. Narratives can be created from almost any data set, be it numbers or text, structured or unstructured.

Whether you maintain your own proprietary database, or cover subjects supported by broadly available data including public data sources, our technology cost-effectively turns facts and figures into compelling stories in real time.

They offer "Long & short form articles, headlines, summaries & more".  Hmm, I wonder how much Narrative Science charges to write blog posts . . .

One parent's suggestion for "21st century skills" curriculum

Our schools say their focus is on teaching "21st Century Skills", incorporating digital devices into the classroom and offering several computer technology courses by the time a student reaches high school.  However, as a parent, I wonder why a certain 8th grader never learned about the risk of viruses from free gaming sites or how to avoid accidentally buying $9.99 ring tone subscriptions for her cell phone.  That would seem to be a critical "21st century skill" - how not to be scammed by the Internet!

What ever happened to elocution instruction in the public schools?

I wish I knew more history, but it does seem as if elocution (or oratory) is a skill mostly dropped from the public school curriculum.  Here is a description from our recent history.

If you were in school in the 1890s, and you wanted to impress your friends, you worked hard at oratory. Good speakers were heroes, even more than good athletes. Schoolchildren memorized Daniel Webster's speeches, and Abraham Lincoln's , too. They learned long poems and recited them at school assemblies. Boys and girls joined debating teams. They learned to speak out - loudly and clearly - and to make their speeches interesting.
A History of US, Book 8, Chapter 13, Joy Hakim

From Wikipedia:

In Western classical rhetoric, elocution was one of the five core disciplines of pronunciation, which was the art of delivering speeches. Orators were trained not only on proper diction, but on the proper use of gestures, stance, and dress. (Another area of rhetoric, elocutio, was unrelated to elocution and, instead, concerned the style of writing proper to discourse.)
Elocution emerged as a formal discipline during the eighteenth century. One of its important figures was Thomas Sheridan, actor and father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Thomas Sheridan's lectures on elocution, collected in Lectures on Elocution (1762) and his Lectures on Reading (1775), provided directions for marking and reading aloud passages from literature. Another actor, John Walker, published his two-volume Elements of Elocution in 1781, which provided detailed instruction on voice control, gestures, pronunciation, and emphasis.
With the publication of these works and similar ones, elocution gained wider public interest. While training on proper speaking had been an important part of private education for many centuries, the rise in the nineteenth century of a middle class in Western countries (and the corresponding rise of public education) led to great interest in the teaching of elocution, and it became a staple of the school curriculum. American students of elocution drew selections from what were popularly deemed, "Speakers". By the end of the century, several Speaker texts circulated throughout the United States, including McGuffey's New Juvenile Speaker, the Manual of Elocution and Reading, the Star Speaker, and the popular Delsarte Speaker. Some of these texts even included pictorial depictions of body movements and gestures to augment written descriptions.

Here's more, from the Wikipedia article on McGuffey Readers, reminding me that spelling and vocabulary instruction may also be downplayed these days.

McGuffey believed that teachers should study the lessons as well as their students and suggested they read aloud to their classes. He also listed questions after each story, for he believed that asking questions was critical for a teacher to give instruction. The Readers emphasized spelling, vocabulary, and formal public speaking, which, in 19th-century America, was a more common requirement than today.

I remember reading that President Johnson was his mother's star pupil.  This was circa 1920.

President Johnson's mother, Rebekah Baines, was one of the few college-educated women in the area. Education was her passion. It was in this home that she taught elocution lessons and debating techniques to the neighborhood children. Lyndon must have listened well to her instructions, for he too taught debate strategies for a school team.
http://www.nps.gov/lyjo/planyourvisit/boyhoodhome.htm

Today, I can think of at least one or two existing courses in our public schools that I'd like to drop in favor of reinstating elocution instruction.  It remains a valuable skill, one that could benefit from formal instruction.

I like this explanation of elocution.

Broadly speaking, the word “elocution” refers to one’s manner of speaking or oral delivery. Elocution can also refer to the study of proper public speaking, with particular attention paid to pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone. is particularly used in reference to an orator’s manner of speech when speaking or reading aloud in public.
There is more to elocution, however, than a tidy definition. During the 1700s, elocution was considered an art form, and a formal discipline. In this capacity, elocution has common ties with pronuntiatio, the art of public speaking, which was one of the five integral disciplines in Western classical rhetoric. In following the syllabus of this art form, academic orators would have studied diction, dress, stance, and the appropriate use of gestures. It seems that in the study of speech delivery, the communications of the unspoken word were equally important to those of the spoken word.

"average U.S. teen sends 3,339 texts a month"

Kids write more, gain ease with language, through texting is the story's headline.  I question if the quality of their writing improves.

The Nielsen Company recently found that the average U.S. teen sends 3,339 texts a month — more than six during every waking hour. Teen females lead the way with 4,050 texts per month....

I would agree that texting helps develop certain language skills:

"Adolescents may not consider their writing to be writing, but it takes skill and creativity in order to manipulate language so you can be understood by your peers," Turner said. "They can experiment with language, have a unique voice and be part of a community."...
Many educators have quickly concluded they need to understand how kids communicate and, rather than scoffing at texting, actively help students switch between different modes of writing."If students know that you understand their text language, they listen to you," said Maureen Lindell, an English teacher at Eastchester High School. "Then we can say, 'This is the language you use with your friends, and this is the language you use in school,' " she said.

And then there's this problem:

Westlake Middle School teacher Christine Silidigan said that some students definitely acquire bad habits from texting, like skipping capital letters and commas and using the wrong forms of words."So instead of discussing important aspects to help a writer grow, we're spending our time undoing all the bad habits formed with texting," she said.

This is hard to believe.

"The research has shown that the best texters are the best spellers and that texting actually improves literacy skills," he wrote.

In fact, I did not find anything specific in this article that shows improved literacy skills were caused by more texting.  Perhaps it is simply a correlation with no causation.  Higher income children are more likely to own mobile phones and computers, so they are more likely to be heavy texters.  And higher income generally correlates with higher literacy skills.